Bruce almighty

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The Venerable Bruce Bryant-Scott from the Diocese of British Columbia displays, once again, his tenuous grip on reality and shallow understanding of human nature in the latest diocesan newsletter.

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Venerable Bruce, ESL Candidate

Nevertheless, a radical group affiliated with the Anglican Network persuaded a majority of the parishioners that they needed to leave the Diocese and the Anglican Church of Canada. They also were determined to take the property, which were and are owned by the Diocese of British Columbia.

All of this was unnecessary. While a number of conservative groups have left the Anglican Church of Canada, with some of them engaging in property issues, the majority of evangelical parishes remain within the body of the national church. They know that the Anglican Church of Canada remains an integral part of the Anglican Communion, and that it is the only part of the Anglican Communion recognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury as operating in Canada.

They know that the Canadian Church has always been a place where there has always been a diversity of opinion held, and that change under the canons, as an autonomous church, was always expected and authorized from the beginning of the Anglican experience in this country.

I’ve always thought that bad English is a sign of chaotic and illogical thought and the venerable Bruce appears to be determined to illustrate this principle.

First, the venerable Bruce is suffering under the delusion that ANiC, by holding to 2000 years of tradition is “radical” and the diocese of B.C. by breaking with it isn’t.

Second, the venerable Bruce claims that the Anglican Church of Canada is “an integral part of the Anglican Communion”. GAFCON represents the only part of the Anglican Communion that is not attempting to accommodate the demented fantasies of a civilisation that is on the brink of self-annihilation. By 2061 there will only be one person left in the venerable Bruce’s version of the ACoC; he or she will feel very isolated in the global Anglican Communion.

Third, the venerable Bruce claims that evangelicals are welcome in the ACoC: it is strange, then, that J. I. Packer, the most renowned evangelical theologian of the 20th century, is unwelcome in the ACoC. What he really means is that evangelicals who are willing to set loyalty to the ACoC over the truth are welcome. Others will be regarded as trespassers.

Fifth, the last paragraph is such meandering drivel, that the venerable Bruce should consider attending an ESL course as soon as possible.

Nazi war propaganda updated for today

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Propaganda was a major component of fighting World War 2. The Nazis, for example, would drop leaflets on cities warning civilians that resistance was not only futile, but would make things worse. Here is an example that was used in the Netherlands:

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It reads:

“Warning!

To the civilians of Holland!

Do not take part in sabotage against the German army!

You can’t stop the German Army!

Large parts of Holland are already occupied!

All resistance is of no use!

Do not take part in sabotage actions like destroying dikes, blowing up bridges, or making road blockades. These actions are of no use because the German Army has lots of technical means to avoid them.

Do not take part in a war that is not yours!

Do not destroy your own country, but stay calm!

Civilians, captured during sabotage actions will get DEATH PUNISHMENT!

Civilians of Holland, we warn you!”

The Anglican Church of Canada is waging a war against Christians who are no longer willing to go along with its agenda of making a god out of the Zeitgeist. The war is being waged largely through intimidation and in courts of law.

The Diocese of British Columbia has also begun launching propaganda salvos, similar in intent and tone to the example above: resistance is futile and is only making things worse. Here is an extract from a letter by the Venerable Bruce Bryant-Scott Commissary to the Bishop, Diocesan Executive Officer & Diocesan Archdeacon. The whole thing is here.

The Network has had a series of defeats in the courts in Canada. Recently our colleagues in the Diocese of Niagara received payment of $20,000 from the Network for the costs of the legal action there. The Diocese of Niagara will be in court again in March and are asking for costs of over $200,000, and I understand there is a reasonable probability that they will be awarded that amount. Donors to the legal fund of the Network should know that they are not only paying their lawyers’ fees, but those of the lawyers defending the dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada.

First to set the facts straight, the Diocese of Niagara wanted $70,000 in costs but were awarded $20,000. They have now asked for over $200,000 in legal expenses: what they will be awarded remains to be seen. The contention that ANiC is further funding diocesan lawyers would only be true if ANiC finally loses the court cases.

Second, the clear purpose of this is to demoralise those fighting for what they believe to be right by insinuating that resistance is not only futile, but counter-productive. It is wartime propaganda.

We are undeterred by such nonsense because we believe what we are doing is right, even if pursuing it comes at a cost.

An Anglican Church of Canada parish has a new Lenten series: studying World Faiths, including Wicca.

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No perverse or grotesque villainy emerging from the ACoC or the ultra-liberal Diocese of Niagara should surprise anyone, but it is helpful to have the occasional reminder of just how far the blight has spread.

This is the Lenten series that is being offered by St. Simon’s Anglican Church, Diocese of Niagara, Oakville, as advertised in the local paper:

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The inclusion – and inclusion is what it’s all about, after all – of Wicca is particularly significant since it is explicitly pagan and is a successor to or derivative of Witchcraft:

Wicca is a neopagan, nature-based religion popularised in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant, who at the time called it Witchcraft and its adherents “the Wica”.

Wiccans, as followers of Wicca are now commonly known, typically worship a God (traditionally the Horned God) and a Goddess (traditionally the Triple Goddess), who are sometimes represented as being a part of a greater pantheistic Godhead, and as manifesting themselves as various polytheistic deities. Other characteristics of Wicca include the ritual use of magic, a liberal code of morality and the celebration of eight seasonal-based festivals.

The purpose of Lent is to prepare Christians – through prayer, penitence, almsgiving and self-denial – for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Apparently, St. Simon’s is unable to find any better way to prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection than by studying faiths that don’t believe in it; but then, for the most part, the ACoC leadership doesn’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection either.

In case anyone is naive enough to think that the series is designed to point out where other religions have erred, take note of the fact that individual speakers representing each religion have been invited to speak at each session. The intent is undoubtedly to find common ground between the parish of St. Simon’s and pagan religions.

This shouldn’t be difficult: there is a lot of common ground between the Diocese of Niagara and worship of the horned god.

Difficulties With Girls

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It was quite a few years back that I read Kingsley Amis’s Difficulties With Girls. The hero, Patrick is preoccupied with sex and is an incurable philanderer. In fact, all the men in the book are preoccupied with sex: Patrick’s  boss Simon announces he’s unable to sexually satisfy his wife; Patrick gets through boring meetings at the office by thinking about women, and hides dirty magazines in his briefcase. The novel, in spite of having a resonance of truth, is fundamentally misogynistic: Amis claims that, at root, all woman are mad – a notion I would have subscribed to at one point in my life but eschew now.

Progress marches ever on: even the luridly fertile imagination of Kingsley Amis would not have come up with this:

Two women told Moscow police they bet Tuganov $US4300 that he wouldn’t be able to satisfy them during a non-stop half day sex marathon.

The mechanic died of a heart attack minutes after winning the wager, Moscow police said.

“We called emergency services but it was too late, there was nothing they could do,” said one of the female participants who identified herself only as Alina.

Medics said he most likely died from the quantity of Viagra he had ingested.

There are 30 pills in an average 100mg bottle of Viagra.

In spite of that, reality has a little way to go to match Anthony Powell’s Pamela in his brilliant A Dance to the Music of Time; she killed herself in order to simultaneously take revenge on the husband she hated and satisfy her necrophiliac lover. I’m still waiting for these headlines.

It's a bum wrap

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I have nothing against protecting the environment: I don’t like smog, smoke or choking yellow haze any more than the next person, but what I use on my rear for my business is –  my business, even if it results in a little extra landfill.

For the green fanatic, though, there is the Wallypop in a variety of colours and understated patterns:Add an Image

“Alright,” you say, “You’ve convinced me about cloth diapers, and I understand using cloth gift bags and napkins. But toilet paper??” For some people, making the switch to cloth toilet wipes is a huge leap, that’s true. But it doesn’t need to be!

Using cloth toilet wipes actually has many advantages. For one, it’s a lot more comfortable and soft on your most delicate body parts. It’s also more economical, uses less paper, and saves you those late-night trips to the store. And cloth wipes can be used wet without any of the sopping disintegration that regular toilet paper is prone to. For a discussion of the practical aspects of using cloth toilet wipes, please check out our page detailing How to Use Cloth Wipes.

There is nothing new under the sun, of course; here are some much more interesting alternatives – not all of which I have tried – as expounded by Gargantua:

Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus.

There is a lot more where this came from and the adventurous reader can find it all in Rabelais’ classic,  Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Destroying sex by being obsessed with it

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In his youth, Leo Tolstoy was consumed with sex; it eventually resulted in his refusing to sleep in the same bed as his wife. Malcolm Muggeridge, an irrepressible roué in his youth, later in life wrote the essay, Down with Sex.

Today we have pills to uplift flagging appendages, pornography in every format to stimulate waning interest, children dressed as hookers, matrons undressed on calendars, alleged counsellors to advise on sexual positions, postures and predicaments, a sexual prophet embalmed in the wrinkled carcass of Hugh Hefner, sex toys, creams, licentious libido lotions, rubbers, diaphragms, morning after and before pills, gay sex education for five year-olds and – this:

Let’s talk about my sexless marriage

Four years into Diane’s marriage, her husband became “bothered” by the prospect of sleeping with her and moved into a room vacated by her grown daughter.

Fourteen years later, the Pennsylvania artist has still not had sex with her “emotionally closed off” husband, who has taken to masturbating to pornography in a separate building on their property.

“I can’t remember the last time I got a hug. It’s probably been a couple of years since I’ve even gotten any kind of a kiss,” says Diane, who did not want her full name used.

Marion Goertz, a registered sex therapist in Toronto, says that although 30 per cent of her female patients complain about low sexual desire and many of her male patients suffer from erectile dysfunction, “couples avoid being sexually intimate for reasons beyond the physical.

When people turn away from God in favour of transitory satisfaction, he eventually gives them what they want, usually in an unsatisfying form. It is a demonstration of William Blake’s Fearful Symmetry: a divine gift that has been humanly framed, sterilised and robbed of its intended purpose becomes empty, spent and finally withers away.

According to the Anglican Church of Canada, Jesus was a racist

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The ACoC has published some Lenten Meditations.

Here is one of them:

“… a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the houseof Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ ” – Matthew 14:22-27

This not a story for people who need to think that Jesus always had it together, because it looks like we’ve caught him being mean to a lady because of her ethnicity. At first, he ignores her cries. Then he refuses to help her and compares her people to dogs.

But she challenges his prejudice. And he listens to her challenge and grows in response to it. He ends up healing her daughter. What we may have here is an important moment of self-discovery in Jesus’ life, an enlargement of what it will mean to be who he was. Maybe we are seeing Jesus understand his universality for the first time.

This meditation makes a number of important points:

Jesus did not “always have it together”. This is modern vernacular for saying Jesus was not sinless.

Jesus was prejudiced against a woman because of her race. The woman in question points out his error, Jesus becomes enlightened and understands his “universality for the first time.” Thus, Jesus was not God, made mistakes and had to be set straight. The reference to understanding his universality is undoubtedly an attempt to point out that, once the woman corrected him, Jesus came to the light as proscribed by 21st Century liberalism: inclusivity is all encompassing, paramount and – well, god.

This is an officially sanctioned document from the ACoC: it denies both Jesus’ divinity and the fact that he is sinless. The ACoC seems to be going out of its way to present itself as a non-Christian organisation; I think it has succeeded.

No Comfort for Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins has declined an offer to debate Ray Comfort. Though Comfort offered him $10,000 to do so, this isn’t enough, apparently:

“It is not, therefore, a worthwhile inducement for me to travel all the way across the Atlantic to debate with an ignorant fool,” he wrote. “You can tell him that if he donates $100,000 to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (it’s a charitable donation, tax deductible) I’ll do it.”

Ray Comfort may not have the intellectual capacity of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I doubt that he is merely an “ignorant fool”. Obviously Dawkins is free not to debate anyone he likes; what is interesting though, is that he was happy enough to debate Bishop Richard Harries, a liberal noted for his appointment of the gay canon Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading in 2003. Harries, as a liberal, has already discarded most of orthodox Christianity, so there wasn’t much to debate. Even Dawkins has spotted the transparently obvious fact that Harries no longer adheres to the scriptures he is supposed to read every Sunday.

As someone pointed out:

The good bishop reminds me very much of the Vicar who married me, and the sunday school Vicar I had as a child for that matter, both were/are Church of England of course. If all christians thought and behaved like these people, we’d have little to worry about!

In fact, from the friendly debates I’ve had over the years with CofE clergy, I’m convinced most of them are really Deists or Agnostic if truth be told, and just want to help out the local community, It seems to be more tradition than anything else. In fact even as an Athiest I find it hard to disagree with anything our local vicar says in Church, his sermons are mostly about bieng nice to each other etc, and never stray into any of that hell fire or sinner crap at all.

Once you have removed the “sinner crap” from Christianity, there isn’t much left.

So on the one hand, you have Bishop Richard diligently using the brains God gave him to wriggle out of the beliefs that are the foundation of his profession, and on the other, Ray Comfort still believing the “sinner crap” that has been part of the Christian faith for the last 2000 years.

Perhaps the real reason Dawkins wouldn’t debate Comfort is because the “sinner crap” touches a nerve.

Not invented here

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In his address to congress Obama declared:

the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it. He said millions of jobs and scores of communities depend on saving the industry.

Does this mean he is going to be sending money to Germany to bolster its automotive industry?

Karl Friedrich Benz (1844-1929), Germany Patent DRP No. 37435: GASOLINE / First true automobile. Gasoline automobile powered by an internal combustion engine: three wheeled, Four cycle, engine and chassis form a single unit.

Did the rest of Obama’s speech make any more sense? Not really:

But I’m worried that it’s not just a matter of what he chooses to put in speeches, but what he knows. It looks very much as if the president is oblivious to everything we’ve learned about social programs and educational reforms in the last 40 years—and by “we” I include policy analysts on the left as well as right. The guy never indicates that he is aware that we’ve tried a whole bunch of the same stuff he wants to try and evaluated it repeatedly and—read my lips—it doesn’t work.

Youths vanquished by a 63 year old lady wielding a wad of paper

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I’ve always wondered what use church meeting minutes were; no-one reads them, no-one is interested and they usually Add an Imagecollect dust in an obscure part of the church secretary’s office.

But now, all that has changed. Alma Harding has shown us the way: they are a weapon to be wielded against unruly vandals.

Here we have yet another vivid demonstration of Mr. Bumble’s hypothesis by the aberrant British legal system, ever vigilant in its enduring quest to prosecute the innocent and exonerate the guilty:

Alma Harding was walking home after a church meeting when she saw three teenagers kicking a ball among the flower beds she had planted on the village green.

After months of petty vandalism in the area, it was the last straw for the arts and crafts teacher.

She called to the group, remonstrating with them, but was alarmed when they approached. One swore at her, calling her a ‘******* fatty’, magistrates heard.

In fear, the 63-year-old lashed out with the church minutes she was carrying, and caught one of the boys, a 13-year-old, on the cheek. She scurried home, upset, and that might have been the end of it.

But the boy and his mother went to police and yesterday Mrs Harding, who sings in the church choir, was convicted of battery.

If this happens again, in addition to swatting them Alma should sing at the malevolent louts.